In April 2012, the jihadist army of the Saharan branch of al-Qaidadrove
a fleet of their armoured pick-up trucks into the centre of the ancient
caravan town of Timbuktu in northern Mali. As black flags were hoisted
atop the minarets, and as trapped and terrified government conscripts
scrambled out of their uniforms, the jihadists began imposing their own
puritanical interpretation of sharia law. Music was forbidden, modest
clothing was forced on the women, stoning was imposed as a punishment
for adultery and a war declared on “unIslamic superstition”.

This began with an attack on Timbuktu’s most revered djinn. Al-Farouk
was said to manifest himself as “a ghostly figure … dressed all in
white, with a length of cotton bound around his face in the Tuareg style
and riding a white horse”. As Charlie English explains in The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu,
the djinn was a guardian, looked on locally as “a talismanic symbol of
the city who for centuries had protected it from malicious spirits”,
with a “monument on a traffic island in the Place de l’Indépendence”.
But for the Salafists of the AQIM – al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb – he
was merely a false idol, and soon after their arrival in Timbuktu, one
of the jihadists climbed on to the monument and decapitated the statue
of the horseman.

The many mausoleums of the city’s saints were the next target: by
June, the jihadists had embarked on a full-scale assault on the ancient
tombs scattered around Timbuktu. They lectured the townspeople on the
evils of their cult of protector-saints, then began to smash the
intricate carvings with pickaxes and metal crowbars.The realisation that Timbuktu’s fragile heritage was in danger set
off alarm bells across the world. The city was once one of Africa’s most
revered centres of learning and the arts. From the 13th century
onwards, but particularly during the great days of the Songhai
empire, which reached its peak during the 15th and 16th centuries,
Timbuktu became the West African equivalent of Oxbridge or the Ivy
League, pullulating with scholars busy copying out old Arabic
manuscripts and composing new works of theology, history and science.

In 2012 the literary remains of this golden age still lay stacked in
libraries around the city. Only in recent decades had scholars come to
appreciate the extraordinary intellectual wealth that lay hidden in
private homes in this now remote but once cosmopolitan centre of
learning. Searches had recently revealed the city to be groaning with
medieval manuscripts “so numerous”, English writes, “that no one really
knows quite how many there are, though they are reckoned [to be] in the
tens or even hundreds of thousands”.

Fida Ag Mohamed in Timbuktu, with some of his family’s ancient manuscripts dating back to the 1300s. Photograph: Xan Rice For African historians, the realisation during the late 1990s of the
full scale of Timbuktu’s intellectual heritage was the equivalent of the
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls for scholars of Judaism in the 1950s.
When the African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr
visited Timbuktu in 1997 he actually burst into tears at the discovery
of the extraordinary literary riches. He had always taught his Harvard
students that “there was no written history in Africa, that it was all
oral. Now that he had seen these manuscripts, everything had changed.”

Yet with the coming of al-Qaida, there was now a widespread fear that
this huge treasure trove, the study of which had only just begun, could
go the way of the Baghdad, Kabul or Palmyra museums, or the Bamiyan Buddhas.
Before long, efforts began to smuggle the most important of the
manuscripts out of Timbuktu and to somehow get them to safety in Bamako,
the capital of Mali. The story of how this was done forms the narrative
backbone of The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, which consequently reads like a sort of Schindler’s list
for medieval African manuscripts, “a modern day folk tale that proved
irresistible, with such resonant, universal themes of good versus evil,
books versus guns, fanatics versus moderates”.

Sean Smith for the Guardian.

English first came across the story when he was head of international
news at this paper, but he had been fascinated by Timbuktu since he
first visited it in his late teens. Realising the potential of the story
he had to tell, he went to Mali to meet the people involved and to
record their tale. What he discovered was rather different and more
morally complex than initial reports had indicated. He also begun to
construct a more complicated framework for his book.

Fascinated by the history of the town and the attempts by 18th and
19th-century western explorers to reach what they imagined to be an
African Eldorado, glinting with gilded domes and a place that could make
their fortunes and immortalise their names, he decided to interweave
the story of the al-Qaida occupation, and the efforts to save the city’s
literary heritage, with accounts of early attempts to reach and
understand Timbuktu, and the role that dreams, imagination and
myth-making all played in the process.

Bruce Chatwin once observed that there are actually two Timbuktus:
one the real place – “a tired caravan town where the Niger bends into
the Sahara” – and another “altogether more fabulous, a legendary city in
a never-never land, the Timbuktu of the mind”.

This mythical Timbuktu
was certainly partly the creation of western orientalists, but as
English astutely notes, it was a myth that Malians also subscribed to
and helped create. After all, the ancient histories of Timbuktu
themselves painted a picture of “a virtuous, pure, undefiled and proud
city, blessed with divine favour” that “had no parallel in the land of
the blacks”. As English persists in his investigations he realises that
his own story of the manuscript smugglers had also undergone a process
of mythologisation at the hands of his informants.

There is no doubt that al-Qaida did represent a threat to the
Timbuktu libraries, and indeed around 4,200 manuscripts were burned by
the jihadists as they were leaving town – just as Isis last month destroyed the great mosque of Mosul
during its retreat. Equally, there is no doubt that the librarians went
to heroic lengths to protect the treasures under their guardianship,
burying some and smuggling out others. But as his research progressed,
he became increasingly suspicious that the scale of the rescue operation
had been exaggerated by the heroes of his tale, as they began to
understand the extent of the willingness of western donors to wire vast
quantities of money to Mali in order to get the precious manuscripts out
to safety.

A French soldier guards Timbuktu airport, 2013. Photograph: Arnaud Roine/AP One librarian claimed to have organised a small army of smugglers
lining the route to Bamako, who carried hundreds of thousands of
manuscripts out on convoys of lorries and later, as the French Foreign
Legion moved north to take on al-Qaida, in fleets of small river boats
down the Niger, braving pirates, ambushes, corrupt government troops and
trigger-happy French helicopter patrols. Of these stories English grew
to be profoundly sceptical. He acknowledges that some manuscripts were
indeed saved in actions that “undoubtedly took chutzpah and courage,
from the directors of the libraries as well as more junior colleagues,
who braved the jihadiststs’ sharia punishments”. But “from these
fundamentals, the operation was spun into something larger and more
dangerous than it really was”. The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu
is an exemplary piece of investigative journalism that is also a
wonderfully colourful book of history and travel. Above all, it is a
work of intellectual honesty that represents narrative non-fiction at
its most satisfying and engaging.

William Dalrymple and Anita Anand’s Koh-i-Noor: A Historyof the World’s Most Infamous Diamond is published by Bloomsbury.

The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu is published by HarperCollins. To order a copy for £15 (RRP £20) go tobookshop.theguardian.comor call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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About Me

This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
Also prominently featured will be posts about the Arts. Animation, photography, and the traditional forms, plus "outsider art," film and books.
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There will be rants. It's an election year, and I am beginning to have a political dimension to my personality. I am also horrified at the level of injustice and violence visited upon people here in the US and elsewhere - particularly against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Some of these stories will be very hard to read, but I believe we must read them to keep ourselves mindful of the racist and vicious things that happen every day, to speak out when we see discrimination, and root out its evil from ourselves.